In the first week of July, however, the period of gayety was checked by the loss of four members of the household. Two of the demoiselles of noble family, whom madame had taken to train as gentlewomen of rank, Berthe de Montfort and Isabelle de Joinville, had now been in Le Crépuscule the customary time for the acquirement of etiquette and the arts of needlework, and escorts arrived from their homes to convoy them away. After their departure, the squires Louis of Florence and Robert Meloc resigned their places and rode out into the world, to seek a life of action.
There were now left in Le Crépuscule the demoiselles whom Lenore had brought with her from Rennes a year ago, and two others who had come to madame many years ago, and who must perforce stay on, having no other home than this, living as they did upon madame’s bounty. And there were also two young squires, who had sworn fealty to madame, but hoped some day to ride to Rennes and win their spurs in the lists of their Lord Duke. For the present they were content to remain out on the lonely coast, where Courtoise taught them the articles of knighthood, and where twenty stout henchmen could look up to them as superiors. These, with David le petit, Anselm the steward, Alixe, Courtoise, and a young peasant woman, who had come to foster the infant of Madame Lenore, comprised the attendants of the three ladies of Crépuscule. It was a well-knit little company, and one so accustomed to the quiet life, that none of them save only one desired better things.
Of the mood of Alixe during these summer months, much might be said. Throughout the spring she had been in a state of hot desire for what was not in Le Crépuscule. She was filled with unrest; but her plans were too vague, too indefinite, for immediate action. Strong as was the will that would have carried her through any difficulty that lay not in the condition of her heart, she was still, after nearly six months of dreaming and debating, in Le Crépuscule. Still she labored through the long, dull mornings; and still, through the afternoons, she drifted about through moving seas of doubt and yearning. She longed for the world, but she could not give up Le Crépuscule, and those whom it held. Here was her problem,—which way to turn. She felt that another such winter as she had just passed would drive her senses from her; but she knew that anywhere outside Le Crépuscule the visions of three faces, the fair, sad faces of her ladies, would haunt her by day and by night till she should return to them at last. She carried her struggle always with her, and at length it drove her to seek an old-time solitude. She began to spend her afternoons in a cave in the great cliff north of that on which the Castle stood. This cave had been formed by the action of the water, and it stretched in cavernous darkness far into the wall of rock,—much farther than Alixe had ever dared to go. Near the entrance, four or five feet above the tide-washed floor, was a little ledge where she was accustomed to sit till the rising water drove her to the upper shore. Tides, in Brittany, are proverbially high; and at full tide the top of the cave’s opening was scarcely visible above the water; so it behooved Alixe to restrain herself from sleep while she lay therein, meditating on her other life.